


sunfish

by gooseberry



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Body Horror, Durin Family Feels, Gen, Mermaids, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 16:23:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1148129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When he leaves the ocean, the sea foam is red with his blood. His legs, though, are white--bone-white, and thin, and delicate. He sways on the sand, the way the deepwater kelp had swayed in the currents below; he feels small and fragile and weak. Each step is a new world: pain and fear and excitement and a heady tang of joy that he hasn’t felt in years. Sand crusts on his tender skin, and the blood beneath his fingernails dries to a tacky red, then to a flaky brown. <br/></i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>---</p>
<p>In which Fili leaves the ocean and all his kin behind, so he can walk on land for five hundred years. Warnings for some body horror near the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sunfish

**Author's Note:**

> This was initially vaguely influenced by Kyuubikun's Healthy Fish Supper art, which can be found here: http://kyuubikun.tumblr.com/post/54558039019/healthy-fish-supper
> 
> However, like all things I write, it mutated like crazy. It’s the bastard child of pretty much a dozen underwater-people myths, in which Fili leaves the ocean and all his kin behind, so he can walk on land for five hundred years. Some, uh, warnings of body horror in the first part.

He leaves the ocean for the sun.

He’s a princeling. His scales are the color of the setting sun and his fins are the same shade as the darkest kelp. His voice is whalesong and his hair is sunlight. He breathes in water and his teeth are as sharp as barbs.

He is a prince.

His mother sings human men into the water, and his father is a murky shape in the deepest abyss; his uncle tears human ships apart. Fili’s home is here, in the depths of the ocean, where the sunlight never reaches, where fish are half-blind and everything glows with its own light.

“You’ll really leave, then?” Kili asks, and Fili blows out a stream of bubbles in frustration.

This is his home, and he’s grown tired of it. He’s lived here long enough to know every current and vent. He knows the width and span of his ocean, from each abyss rising up, and he’s grown bored of it, tired of it. Bored and tired of waiting for his turn to die, because it will never come. He’ll linger here as long as his kin lingers here, until the ocean itself dries up.

“It will never end,” he tells Kili, and he leans back, lets the current drag him along. His fins are caught in the cross of the water, tugged like a lover is touching him. He closes his eyes and says, “Thorin left once. He came back. I can do the same.”

“Will you come back?” Kili asks, and Fili sighs, letting the current carry him away.

“Will you come back?” his mother asks, and Fili reaches out to touch a bit of kelp that has been caught in her hair. She reaches for the kelp, too, and catches his hand, holds it tight. “Fili?”

“I will,” he promises.

x

He tears away his gills first. His gills are tender things, fleshy flaps of skin and muscle along his neck; he can feel every current of water run across his gills, and when he lays his own fingers on them, it feels like a knot is turning over in his belly. He runs his fingers along his gills, along the ruffled edges of nerves and delicate veins, and then he digs his fingers in.

He tears his gills away, and each wrench feels as though the knot in his belly is becoming a massive, empty ache, radiating down through his tail and up through his chest. He tears, and he rips, and he shreds, until his neck is an open wound. Then he creeps through the shallow water, pulling himself further up the shore. 

When his head breaks the surface of the water, the sunlight blinds him. He moans, the sound new and aching in his throat, and he tries to cover his eyes. The salt burns him, from his eyes to his bleeding throat, and he pants for breath, opening his mouth and trying to drink the air like water. 

And then, while he is still learning how to breathe, he cuts away his tail.

He uses the jagged edges of seashells to dig into his flesh, to cut his tail in half. He saws through muscle and through bone, and his eyes are white with pain. He can hear the cracking of his tail, the wet pulse of blood; his hands are gritty from sand and sticky from blood, and there are deep scores in his palms from his broken-shell knives. 

Again, and again, and again, he digs the shell into his tail, through armor of his scales and the strength of his muscle and the power of his bone. 

When he leaves the ocean, the sea foam is red with his blood. His legs, though, are white--bone-white, and thin, and delicate. He sways on the sand, the way the deepwater kelp had swayed in the currents below; he feels small and fragile and weak. Each step is a new world: pain and fear and excitement and a heady tang of joy that he hasn’t felt in years. Sand crusts on his tender skin, and the blood beneath his fingernails dries to a tacky red, then to a flaky brown. 

He falls as often as he stands. Each step is a new world, and each fall is a new lesson, and he feels like a child again, when his world had been the dark safety of a forest of kelp. Everything is new--the dryness of his skin, the tightness of the heat; the shape of his feet and the smooth skin of his legs. 

He leaves the ocean, crawling and stumbling and walking, and he leaves all his blood behind, in the depths beneath the sea foam.

x

His legs are fire coral set in bone; his voice is the croak of a deep-sea fish. The sunlight burns his skin until it blisters.

The pains are all new. He knows the pain of a poisonous sting and the pain of a torn fin. He knows what it feels like, to scrape his scales off with a careless brush against coral. These things, though--walking, and speaking; breathing _air_ \--these things are new pains to him, bright hot pains that lodge into his very bones. He hadn’t realized how much it would hurt, to become something that he’s not.

But slowly, slowly, the pains fade. His skin grows dark and tough, and his legs grow hard with muscle. He learns how to speak through his mouth, and how to breathe without his gills; he learns how to breathe deeply, until it feels like he’s swimming in water again.

In time, and time, and more time, the sun stops burning his eyes.

x

It is close to five centuries before he sees his kin again. 

He travels by land, following highways that grow and fade and grow again; he watches as roads are laid with stone, and as weeds grow up through the stone, until the highways crumble away to gravel. He walks along dusty roads, crossing the continent in each direction, as kingdoms become empires become colonies become kingdoms again.

It is many long, slow, sun-baked years. His skin grows rough and thick and dark, and his feet grow hard. The sun stops burning his eyes, and the scars on his throat fade away to a thin, pale webbing. He learns a dozen tongues, and forgets twice as many; he gets a dozen children on a dozen women, scattered across distance and across time. His children are all limpid-eyed and frothy, delicate things that remind him of sea foam washed ashore. Some of his children die. Some of his children live. There are, he knows, hundreds now; villages of limpid-eyed men and women, three and six and nine generations removed. They smell of brine, their hair and their skin and their breath; Fili breathes in deeply when he’s surrounded by his children, and it nearly feels as though he’s found his way home, for all that the ocean is hundreds of leagues away.

He stays away from the ocean. For years, and years, and years, he walks on packed earth. He learns how to plant wheat and millet in the south, and how to coax up barley and rye in the far north. He works with wood and with stone, until his hands are all over with white scars. He learns every slow beat of the earth, from the growth of grain to the slow, tumbling fall of a tree. It is a slow, quiet time, all those years walking the land.

And then, one sunrise, he turns to the west and begins to walk.

x

He haunts the western ports for a decade or more, moving south and then north, following the arch of the sun in the sky. He watches the ocean freeze over, and he watches the ice crack like tree limbs in winter; in the summer, he listens to the trumpet of whalesong, carried over the summer waves.

At night, when the stars look like the lights of the fish in the deepest parts of the ocean, he stands on the beach, the sand crumbling away beneath his feet. The surf is cold and frothy, curls around his ankles like a lover’s hands. When he breathes in, he can taste salt in the back of his throat--like sweat and tears and blood; like the taste of his own kin. He breathes it in deep, the memory of his home, and he follows the ocean north and south; north, and south, and north--

“Are you looking for work?” a man asks him once, in a port far to the north. The winter is retreating, the ice in the harbor beginning to crack, and the ships are swarmed with men. Fili looks at the man, then at the far end of the harbor, where the ocean is waiting.

“Which ship?” Fili asks.

The ocean is different on the surface. Here it is brilliant, all sunlight on waves, everything blinding flashes of light: the silver flash of a fish, the shattering gold of breaking waves. The water beats against the side of the ship, a heartbeat Fili can almost recognize--like the echo of a voice in another room, or the half-remembered voice of lovers from centuries before.

There are times that the ocean is like a sheet of glass, the ship a tiny thing floating above it. Fili spends hours tucked up in the rigging, listening to the silence of the wind, the faint heartbeat of the ocean, the shudder of his own breath. He watches the surface of the ocean, the smooth reflection of the sky above, and he wonders what is below the surface. He wonders if his cousins are just below the surface, close enough that their fins scrape against the keel; he wonders if his mother is fathoms before, being carried along by underwater currents.

“What do you look for?” a sailor asks him once. Fili shrugs, smiles.

“I heard once,” he says, “that there are people who live below the water.”

The sailor looks out to the water with him, and asks, “Mermaids? Or sirens? All bad luck, I’ve heard--they drown men, tear ships apart. Change the weather, even.”

“Change the weather?” Fili asks, equal parts baffled and amused. “All I’ve ever heard is that they eat human flesh--sing the sailors down, then tear them limb from limb.”

The sailor scowls and says, “It’s bad luck to talk about them, most like. There are stories you only tell on land.”

“Are there?” Fili leans forward against the bulwark and says, “I imagine that their homes are beautiful.”

x

He’s been at sea for a half dozen or so years when he hears the rumors of his kin.

“Mermaids,” one sailor says, and a second scoffs and says, “Sirens.”

Fili sidles up to the two, waits until there’s a lull in their conversation and he can ask, “Where?”

Both men look at him a little crossly, but one nods out toward the ocean, saying, “Not far outside port.”

Fili looks out as far as he can, squints as though that will help him. He can see the glint of sunlight on the water, and dark shapes breaking the surface. Porpoises or whales, most like; maybe seals.

“Selkies,” he offers, and when the men look at him, he says, “I’ve heard tales of creatures up north, with skins like seals. Beautiful women, when they tear off their skin.”

He had a dozen beautiful women, scattered over a half-dozen centuries. He tore off his skin, piece by piece, and he stumbled away from the ocean. He walked east, with his secret locked behind his lips. All the same stories, but with the pieces all jumbled--a woman coming out of the ocean, or a man. But, he thinks, what is the difference, when in the end there are always gray-eyed children who smell of brine?

“You can get one for a wife,” he tells the men, and he smiles, says, “If you believe that sort of thing, people living beneath the waves.”

He leaves the port and walks north, keeping the ocean to his left. He walks until the port is three days behind him, then he turns west. He climbs down the steep embankment, until he’s reached the sand dunes; then he stumbles, sliding and slipping, down the sand to the water’s edge, where the sand is dark and wet and sticks to his toes. It’s late afternoon now, the sun low in the sky, and he paces up and down the beach for the rest of the daylight, wading through the sea foam. Then, when the sun has set and waves have gone dark, he wades into the ocean.

He’s forgotten how to speak--or maybe, in honesty, he’s healed all wrong. His throat is a thin, fragile thing, and his whalesong is gone. When he dunks his head beneath the water, the salt burns his eyes and his throat; when he tries to speak, he runs out of air, and has to stand up before he drowns. Maybe, in healing, he has become human.

When he is breathless and his throat is burning, he staggers back up out of the water, going far enough up the sand that he won’t be swept out to sea with the tide. Then he sits, wrapping his arms around his legs, and he waits.

It is sunrise before he spots it: a dark shape breaking the surface of the water, like a porpoise or a seal. Fili rises to his feet and makes his way down the sand, until he’s standing at the edge of the surf. The foam is almost pink, stained by the sunrise, and Fili skims his foot over it, then sets his foot down in the wet sand. The sand breaks beneath his weight, under the force of the tide. It feels like Fili is standing on the edge of an abyss, and there is nothing below to catch him.

The dark shape is closer when it next breaks the surface, and Fili can see the green and yellow of its tail and fins. He feels breathless with anticipation, and it is like when he first walked out of the ocean, his legs shaking and his footing unsure, his lungs tight with fear and excitement. The shape moves further north, and Fili keeps pace with it, walking through the shifting tide, his feet blanching out the wet sand.

The shape--the figure--comes closer to the beach slowly, steadily, like its own moon-driven tide. The green and yellow of its tail and fins grows brighter, clearer, and Fili’s breath grows harsher. He is certain--so close to certain--

And, just before noon, the figure breaks the surface close enough that Fili can see his face. Fili stops where he is and, turning to face the ocean head-on, he waits.

It’s not long before Kili is close enough that if Fili wanted, he could reach him--and he does. He wants it madly. It is an ache deeper and stronger than he’d ever known before. He charges into the water like a--like an ox, like a clumsy beast throwing itself through the water. He stumbles, but he rights himself, and he plows forward, forcing his way through the water. It is loud. Everything is loud. The waves are are loud, and his splashing is loud; Kili’s laughter and Fili’s own desperate gasping is loud. Even the sound of his heartbeat, frantic and painful, is thundering in his ears. 

When he reaches Kili, he grabs him, digging his fingers into Kili’s arms, then into the slick scales on Kili’s back. The water here is deep, and the waves are pulling and pushing, a current far steadier than anything Fili ever found on land. His feet are losing the sand beneath him, and when the waves pull at him, trying to pull him further away from the shore, he lets them: tightens his arms around his brother, and lets the waves pull him away from the land.

Kili’s fingers are cool and prickly, a hint of scales spread across his fingertips and his palm. When he touches Fili’s face, the edges of the scales prick at Fili’s skin, catch and tug at Fili’s hair. Fili leans his face into Kili’s hands, and he lets his brother carry him out to sea.

When Kili speaks, it is in cries and clicks--it is whalesong, and time has made it nearly foreign to Fili’s ears. There is memory, though, hidden deep within his body, deeper than blood and muscle and bone. There is a voice that is older than him, than his family, than his kind. It’s the same as the ocean currents, as deep and cold and constant as the water in the deepest abyss. It is the thrumming of the world’s waters, and it tells him,

“Welcome home, brother.”


End file.
